Kindness Comic with Comic Life

Students Create a Kindness Comic Strip

Students write 3 - 5 acts of kindness on a worksheet handout and use this information along with several images to create a simple one page comic strip.

The program used is Comic Life Deluxe. A basic webcam or camera can be used to take headshots of the students to use in their comics. The headshot pictures can be saved on a shared network folder or uploaded to an online photo gallery for student access. The students will use the 3 - 5 acts of kindness sentences they entered on the worksheet for their comic.

Finished Kindness Comic Strip Example:

Instructions:

1) Download the worksheet, make copies for students to fill out. Discuss the meaning of kindness and have students make suggestions about what acts of kindness they can do. Have students write down 5 acts of kindess they can demonstrate in class. Alternate: Handout pre-printed slips of paper to the kids with a random kindness act written on it. Each child will model the kindness act on their slip of paper.

2) Take pictures of students demonstrating acts of kindness that can be used in their comic. Pulling out a chair, holding a door open, tying a shoe, helping with a jacket, sharing a book or other items, handing someone a box of tissues, putting a bandaid on a scratch, etc. Alternate: Create groups of three children. Give each group one camera. Each child takes two or three pictures of the other two modeling various acts of kindness.

3) Take headshot pictures of the students for their comic strip. The headshots and acts of kindness images should be made available for access by students. Some options are using thumbdrives, shared folders, internet photogallery or file storage, or discs. Optionally, students may use images collected from the internet.

4) Demonstrate and model the usage of the Comic Life application. Students drag and drop their headshot and the kindness images onto the comic strip. Students then narrate the images using speech boxes and bubbles. Students should save their work before exiting the application. Comic life allows saving the students' work as images, pdf files, html web pages, or movies.

5) Create the projects and have fun! This lesson could likely be done with 2nd grade students in about 2-5 sessions of 45 minutes or more each. One session may be needed to familiarize students with the program, allowing them time to experiment and explore the interface and it's features. Additional sessions would be used for research and creation of their project.

Mini Tutorials

Learn how to use Comic Life. Hover over the thumbnail images.

Add a page template

Add a picture

Add a title

Add a text box

Add a background

Example:

Simplified Kindness Template:

To make it simpler and faster for the kids to get started, download this template and put it on the computers in advance. Ideally it would be on all the desktops or easily available using a shared network folder, CDs, or thumbdrive. When the kids click on this template, it will open up in Comic Life.